There is an emerging world market need for local area wireless personal communications. In many parts of the world, government agencies have allocated frequency spectrum for this type of service. In the United States, the FCC has stated that there is no spectrum that can be granted to this service on a license primary user basis. However, the FCC's position has been interpreted to say that the Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) band may be used for this purpose on a shared secondary basis, provided low-power spread-spectrum transmissions are used. Recently, the FCC issued specific rules pertaining to this type of service.
It is apparent that if one can provide a system compliant with these rules at a low cost that is resilient to the interference that might be encountered while operating in the ISM band on a secondary basis, it would service a growing need for local area communications.
In traditional radio systems, a transmission takes place by modulating the information of the transmission about a single carrier frequency. In a frequency-hopping spread-spectrum system, the radio breaks the information to be transmitted into equal periods of time, one period known as one hop time, and transmits on a different carrier frequency for each hop time in a pseudo-random order. A radio receiver then tunes to the proper frequency at the appropriate time for each hop in order to demodulate the message. This requires a communication protocol that enables the receiver to synchronize, also known as sync for short, to the transmitted signal in both frequency and time with good audio quality. It is also necessary to be sure that messages do not collide or overlap at the base station, since loss of information would result. Reference is made to U.S. patent application Ser. No. 07/634,368, filed on Dec. 27, 1990 on behalf of James McDonald, with the same assignee as the present invention, titled "Wireless Personal Communication System" which may contain related material. Reference is also made to U.S. patent application Ser. No. 07/647,334, filed on the same date with the same assignee as the present invention on behalf of William Pickert et al., titled "Digital Communication Signalling System" which may also contain related material.